Semi-conductor devices have been used to enhance printed publications by adding sound. For example, greeting cards have been made with memory chips embedded in the cards for directly producing sounds by means of a small transducer (speaker) also embedded in the card.
Nippon Gakki Co. Ltd. has provided music books under the trademark Yamaha Clavinova ROM Music Book, that include a semi conductor ROM attached to a book of sheet music and including a connector for plugging into a special music stand of an electronic keyboard instrument. The combination plays a fully orchestrated accompaniment to the scores in the book. Information stored in the ROM illuminates guide lamps above the keyboard to show the user which notes to play. The accompaniment is paced by the keyboard, that is the accompaniment waits until the proper key is pressed before proceeding.
Readers have long sought to enhance the usefulness of printed publications by being able to quickly and economically locate information of specific interest contained therein. Over the centuries the printed index, and, to a lesser extent, the table of contents, have been found to be the most, if not the only, practical mechanism for fulfilling this need. Printed indices have been used even where there was an interest in reviewing the content of a book without having to remove the book from its shelf, as shown in U.S. Pat. No. 2,465,616 where a removable index was printed on a strip housed within a book's binding. Today, readers expect and demand, and publishers routinely provide, an index and table of contents fixedly bound in the vast majority of all printed non-fiction works.
However, printed indices have several significant limitations. Perhaps most deleterious of these is that only a very small number of the words used in the work may be included in the index because of space and cost restrictions. This has resulted in indices of widely varying quality, dependent on the editorial skill of the indexer(s). Moreover, this has posed challenges for readers as they must deftly surmise those words chosen by the indexer to convey the location of the information of interest to the reader. Indeed, most likely every reader has, from time to time, been frustrated by an inability to locate information of interest due to the nature of a work's index.
Electronic indices have overcome such limitations. In an electronic index all words in a work may be indexed because the index may be stored in electronic memory that is compact and inexpensive. Where all words are indexed, the quality of the index is not dependent upon an indexer's editorial skill and the reader need not possess mystical powers to divine the word or words selected by the indexer to indicate the location of the information of interest. Additionally, electronic indices allow utilization of more sophisticated searching methodologies, such as those dependent upon Boolean logic.
Unfortunately, electronic indices heretofore available possess their own shortcomings, the most substantial of which has been the essential requirement that they be accessed on separate computers and distributed on media apart from the printed work, such as CD-ROM or floppy disks. At the very least this has meant appreciable inconvenience and added costs for both the publisher and the reader, and perhaps has diminished the usefulness of electronic indices sufficiently to discourage interest therein. Given the wide variety of computer hardware and software that potential readers might use from which to access electronic indices, publishers wishing to distribute such aids have been left with conundrum of supporting numerous disparate computer platforms at great expense or excluding a significant portion of its potential market.
In some measure to surmount these limitations, entire printed works have been made available electronically in what amounts to small, usually hand held computers known as electronic books. While electronic books allow incorporation of electronic indices and/or full text searching, they do not enhance printed publications; they are substitutions subject to all limitations of small computers, including poor display quality and costs.
General and special purpose personal computer devices are becoming increasingly popular as their cost falls and their utility increases. Many people own or have access to one or more computing devices, such as a personal desk top computer, a lap top or other portable computer, hand held computer or personal digital assistant (PDA), electronic note book/calendar/address or telephone directory, which is actually a general purpose computer with specialized software for providing a particular function, and the like. Most of these personal computer products include some form of I/O. Serial and parallel communication ports are common. Infrared and other wireless connections are becoming more common, and other forms of wired or wireless communications will appear as the technologies for implementing them become available.
Some of the devices just mentioned have a capability for storing and displaying text, graphics, sounds and the like, either in memory within the computer, or by means of external memory, such as magnetic memory, optical memory, and the like. While useful, many if not most readers prefer to obtain information in printed form from books. There are many reasons for this, some personal to individual readers, and some technical, such as the quality of the display of text, graphics and images in computers presently available. For whatever reason, the vast majority of text, image and graphics is still provided to readers in printed form.
The printed format has, in addition to the advantages that make it popular among readers, serious limitations. The amount of information that can be provided in a book is directly related to the size of the book. Although books are conceptually random access devices, in that a reader may proceed immediately to any page, there is no convenient way to implement hyper text concepts in a book. Except for indices, tables of contents, and the like, there is no convenient way for the reader of a book to proceed immediately from general information on a topic to more specific information and back without quickly losing one's place.